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A Catskill Catalog by Bill Birns

‘Twas a Catskill magic Christmas, and stockings were hung
from the bluestone mantel of a Livingston.
Whether Robert of Clermont, or Robert the Judge,
or Chancellor Robert, doesn’t matter a fudge.
For a hundred years, they held in their hands
millions of acres of wilderness lands.
Whole Hardenbergh Patent, they’d bought it all square:
the view from their window to the west Delaware.

It’s a book I should have bought years ago: The Ulster and Delaware… Railroad Through the Catskills, by Gerald M. Best, first published in 1972. It’s available as a Purple Mountain Press and Golden West Books reprint, published in 2000.

Natty Bumppo was America’s first mountain man, and Natty never lived. Never took a breath. Natty was a product of the imagination of James Fenimore Cooper, the born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth son of self-made millionaire, William Cooper of Cooperstown.

In September 1949, the Catskill Mountain News reported the death of the “best known man in Delaware County.” James Foreman of Delhi, known to all as Jim, had been Chairman of the Delaware County Republican Committee for 36 years.

The smack of shoulder pad on shoulder pad. The thwack of leather helmet against padded, thick, canvas knickers. The sounds of high school football punctured the autumn air in the small towns of the 1940s Catskills.

Sojourner Truth was a force of nature. From the 1840s to the 1880s, this eloquent, six-foot woman’s magnetic presence electrified audiences throughout the country, audiences wowed by her keen wit, down-home charm, and biting sarcasm, as she challenged the status quo and called for social justice.